Relationship with God

[Twinky]

We are children, God is our Father.

Christ is the husband, we are the wife, as Ephesians 5 and other passages describe.

Actually John, TWI teaches that we are the body of Christ, not the bride or the wife.

There are very few references to the "bride of Christ" in the NT but there are a shedload of references to us being the Body of Christ, especially in 1 Cor 6, 10 and 12; Ephesians, Colossians and Hebrews. I was going to post something else but it would derail this thread so I'll start something in Doctrinal. Perhaps you would care to join me there?

If we are going to have a relationship with anyone - it's important to know who they really are, and that can only be found out through time and effort. You can know a lot about a person by what they read or what is written about them - but you can also find it's completely misleading.

We read about the President or the Queen or a film star or a rock star - we can read all we like, it's someone else's understanding of that person. But if we met the President/Queen/film star, they might be quite different from what we'd thought, from reading about them. How much more so if we read about someone who is dead - a president or monarch of the 1800s?

So much study, yet so little time spent quietly growing the relationship.

[johnj]

Actually John, TWI teaches that we are the body of Christ, not the bride or the wife.

There are very few references to the "bride of Christ" in the NT but there are a shedload of references to us being the Body of Christ, especially in 1 Cor 6, 10 and 12; Ephesians, Colossians and Hebrews. I was going to post something else but it would derail this thread so I'll start something in Doctrinal. Perhaps you would care to join me there?

I'm aware that TWI teaches that we are not the bride. How they overlooked the several times in which Jesus and Paul both speak of Jesus Christ as husband/ groom, I don't know. The fact that the NT mentions the body of Christ more often doesn't mean that the image of the bride/ wife is any less important.

TWI misused the "counting" method in its teaching about Jesus Christ also. Just because "son of God" is used many times doesn't discount the other images or terms used of Jesus, suich as deity, Lord, I am and so forth.

[WordWolf]

We're discussing "body vs bride" in Doctrinal right now....